In some cases, a consumer may want to restrict his usage of his account so that certain transactions are authorized and some are not. A typical example may be where a parent provides a credit card to a minor child. Another example may be where an employer provides a credit card to an employee for use in conducting transactions related to his employment. In such situations, the party responsible for payment may wish to limit the authorized user to a subset of transactions that is much more granular than just a credit limit as imposed by the card issuer. The user may set authorization controls whereby payment card transactions are blocked at the authorization stage of a transaction if certain blocking criteria are met. For example, the user may inform a central server that authorization requests for transactions associated with a payment card should be denied if the transactions are conducted out of the country.
Although such authorization controls are effective, there are many situations where a transaction may be cleared even though the payment transaction was not supposed to be. Clearing of a transaction is the process where a merchant or an acquirer (e.g., a bank with a merchant account) provides the appropriate issuer with information on the sale. This may include providing data required to identify the cardholder's account and providing the dollar amount of the sale. When the issuer gets this data, the issuer posts the amount of the sale as a draw against the cardholder's available credit and prepares to send payment to the acquirer. The next step after clearing is settlement which is the actual exchange of funds.
As an illustration of how an effort to control transaction authorizations through authorization request messages may not be fully effective to prevent transactions from proceeding, a merchant may have a “floor limit” of $100. This means that if a consumer makes a purchase transaction at the merchant for less than $100, the merchant can authorize the transaction without having to go to the issuer to determine whether or not the current transaction should be authorized (e.g., whether the consumer has sufficient funds to cover the transaction or has other restrictions on his account) according to controls that are set for authorization request messages. Thus, even though the user may want to prohibit the transaction at the merchant, an authorization request message is not sent to the issuer and the authorization controls that may reside between the merchant and the issuer may not be invoked. As a result, a transaction that should not have occurred may inadvertently occur.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems individually and collectively.